The month of December was hectic, mostly because it was spent finishing out the last of my strenuous medical school rotations. Around the middle of the month, the Army posted the assignments for all of their medical students, and granted me the best birthday present I've ever received. I'm headed back to Hawaii for five years of Orthopedic Surgery training! It was my number one choice for location and specialty. As exciting as this is, it's sad that it will reduce my mentoring relationship with Jamal to occasional phone calls, and perhaps an annual visit. Of course, with the demands of residency and the possibility of children of my own just around the corner, it's likely that even if I spent the next few years in Baltimore, we would be seeing a lot less of each other.
Anyway, during the Christmas holiday, we did spend some time together. We went to the local ice rink one afternoon, and I stopped by his house another afternoon to hang out for a bit. Despite not skating since we went almost a year ago, he picked it right back up and was tearing around the track for the last hour of our session. During the outing, we inevitably came to the topic of his grades. The quarter ended in November, but there's still no report card for me to read. It's the same old game. Baltimore schools don't give report cards to the students, so it's up to Grandma to call and request it. I've been through this before. Last year only two report cards ever made it home, and I carried one of those directly from the school myself. Jamal tried to convince me that I shouldn't worry about it because he doesn't think that he made our goal of 85% in every class. When I ask why, he just tells me "I don't know."
I could get frustrated, but I've decided that it's a waste of energy. Jamal is probably never going to be motivated to do more than whatever gets him by in the classroom. I'm going to have to accept that. He is however, really picking up the pace on his development as an artist. He continues to do his lessons from The Art Institutes each month, and I've heard good things about his progress from the staff there. I ran into a few who were familiar with his work when I enrolled myself in the course last month. So I'll continue to push him in that direction.
As we've spent time together over the last year and a half, I've often wondered when (if ever) would be the right time to correct some of his spoken grammar. He tends to speak with the poverty-laced dialect that is typical of Baltimore's children and adults. About six months ago, I decided to give it a try. After all, if he's going to grow up to go to college or art school, and work in the professional world, he's going to have to get in the habit of speaking that language. What I found is when I told him that "there ain't no" should be phrased as "there aren't any" he actually counter-corrected me. He was convinced that it was me who had it backwards. After a few more attempts spread across weeks to months with similar responses or total silence (indicating a degree of frustration) I've pretty much abandoned all grammar correction. What sense does it really make for me to step in a few times a month, and try to instill speech that is more appropriate for mainstream America, but is completely foreign to him? As I've heard in the past, our speech reflects the way we're spoken to. Jamal's grandmother, his closest family member, speaks to him with the dialect of a southern sharecropper with a sixth grade education. Combine that with the inner city Baltimore speech of his peers, and you can see that there are no obvious solutions to adjust his speech. So what can you really do? Sure, it's a part of who he is, but I can't help but think of how many opportunities he may miss in the future because he is never taken seriously.
